The Eternal Swordsman
by Omega-Saber
Summary: Follow the ROG as he adventures his way through an alternate version of Sword Art Online. In This world, Kayaba Akihiko spread SAO through Multiple countries, and our favourite immortal just couldn't resist the temptation of something new. Whether this will prove to be to his doom or to the salvation of the other players is yet to be found out.
1. Prolouge

Right, so here is my attempt at another fanfic. Hopefully between this and my other fic I can keep up the motivation to keep updating. So enjoy and feel free to review.

'Djsj' - thought. "Djsj" - speech

Disclaimer- I own neither Highlander, Sword Art online or any other associated character or universe portrayed in this story. No Profit is being made from this story

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'This was his own fault' he supposed as he glanced around himself at all the panicked faces. 'My instincts told me that their was something fishy about this whole thing, and yet against my own better judgement, I did it anyway'. I suppose what they say about age leading to wisdom really was a load of rubbish, not that that should have taken me this long to figure out.

It was just that I could never help himself when it came to the really big and history changing things. Oh sure, I proclaimed myself as the ultimate 'survivor', the man who sees trouble and immediately heads the other way. When getting to know me, or more usually whatever me Ive decided suits my needs at the time, people usually came to this conclusion very easily on their own. And, indeed, I actively encouraged them to. But if anyone really knew my real history, something I spent ten years with the watchers as well as countless others elsewhere ensuring that no-one did, then they would start to see that for a survivor, I'm was always suspiciously close to the most ground breaking events and discoveries.

I of course would claim it coincidence that I just so happened to have befriended Albert Einstein, and then been hanging around when he made most of his discoveries. It was just bad luck that I somehow had to duck out of that life because of a little thing like dying from radiation poisoning(surprisingly not the first time I'd done so, but that's a story for another time) in a very public place. And again, so what if the history books technically left out that the fateful flight where Amelia Earhart disappeared, she had a passenger onboard. I had been, and indeed still was, wherever she was in the world, good friends with Amelia and it was bad luck when we had crashed in the ocean. One more reason why I dislikes it.

But this one had to take the metaphorical cake. My escapades have caused me to be repeatedly killed, tortured, chased and generally terrorised before, but having my mind locked within a game was a new one even for me.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh". 'Oh' I thought ' the screamers have started. Every tragedy has them I supposed but that didn't make them any less irritating to me.I suppose that it may just be my cynicism shining through but I really wished they would stop. At this point Kayaba Akihiko had just reached the part of his little tutorial where everyone got a mirror. It took all my considerable years of practise in staying in character to keep my facade of a terrified grad student stuck in a death trap with no hope, to keep from bursting out laughing when the 'woman' who had been screaming at such a high pitch, and indeed still was, was actually a man. A portly, middle aged man who was now standing in a very short skirt, in the middle of the plaza, still screaming like a little girl.

It was at this point I realised I was in shock. Yes, I had experience dealing with the unknown and unexpected, but even an immortal might not survive a blast of high powered microwaves to the brain, and even if I did who knows how much of who I am would be lost. At my most cynical I would laugh, and joke that maybe that was a good thing, that I could use a few less of my memories, or even laugh that it seems like someone already tried it on me with how little I could remember of my beginnings.

But the uncomfortable truth was, I was terrified of losing who I was. I may claim not to remember a lot of the time and its almost true, but thats not because I can't. Immortal memory was an amazing thing, and regardless of how long you lived you didn't just forget. It was so strong that even our quickenings, after being separated from our bodies, still retained large chunks of our memories. And despite all the things that I should want to forget, I never would, both by fact and by choice, because they helped make me who I am. And If I had to take the bad memories in order to keep the good, well, then I would just have to live with it.

So even the chance that this death game of Kayaba's could rob me of some of that had me terrified, and thinking back on how I, Methos, self-proclaimed oldest living immortal, cynic, survivor and mastermind had come to trapped here with the 30,000 other players in the mousetrap that was Sword Art Online.


	2. Chapter 1

'Djsj' - thought. "Djsj" - speech

Disclaimer- I own neither Highlander, Sword Art online or any other associated character or universe portrayed in this story. No Profit is being made from this story

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London - England - August 6th 2022

In the slowly modernising streets of London, in a relatively new apartment, looking exactly the same as every other apartment in the area, we find one building that is slightly different from the rest. Not that anyone would ever be able to tell from the outside, a detail that had been ensured by the lengths the owner had went to as well as his considerable experience in hiding in plain sight.

What made this apartment out of all the others so special is that, once you got past the outer layer, it wouldn't have been out of place in the private penthouse of some of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Now, normally the owner would never have gone for this style, preferring to mould their abode around whatever persona they were using at the time, but this was an exception to that rule. It wasn't that the identity that he had been using wouldn't have wanted this style of house, no, on the contrary, it would be their dream home. But if Dave Adams were really just that, Dave Adams - a 26 year old computer engineer hoping to get involved in the latest big explosion of computer technology, the nervegear - then the apartment that he found himself in could only belong to him in a dream.

Fortunately for young mr. adams, that wasn't the case. Dave Adams, or Methos as he goes by with a very select and small group of people, had significantly more resources to call upon than his supposed identity should, thanks partly to some very smart long term investments he had made, and partly due to selling some of the old trinkets he had lying around about the world, that he no longer had a use for.(Amanda had been overjoyed at the prospect of fencing them for him, at a respectable percentage for herself of course). This meant that when he had the desire to, as he currently did, there wasn't much he couldn't acquire. Combined with the very real knowledge he had acquired in computer and software engineering, alongside any other technical skill he could get his hands on, meant that his apartment was a paradise for anyone even remotely interested in electronics.

This unfolded itself in the form of a self sustaining apartment, with totally independent power, water and sewage systems, capable of running without assistance and no needed extra fuel for a maximum of 10 years. A state of the art super computer, built by himself to his own specs, a dedicated internet connection that taps directly into the main fibre optic running underneath the atlantic with a secondary satellite uplink for emergencies, all completely untraceable of course, even by the maker of nerve-gear while inside his own system.'And that had cost him several favours that he had being saving for the last century or so for just the right time'. All this was hooked up to the most advanced entertainment and research system that money and his knowledge could provide and secured with, if he says so himself, one of the most elaborate and foolproof security system's that currently exist, both private and government owned included in that. To make extra sure this little nerdvana was never stumbled upon he'd taken the precaution of purchasing not just the building the apartment was in, but the whole street, under various corporations and false, completely untraceable identities of course.

Now, if anyone actually knew he had done this, it would raise some serious questions, especially from those who actually know who he is. But what would really probably confuse his 'old friends' was that included in this set up was a state of the art bed and life support system capable of sustaining a comatose patient in almost perfect health for up to 5 years without any difficulty. (The culmination of his past lives as a Doctor and his current technical expertise, and it had more than paid for itself and this entire set-up if he was honest).Most would ask him why he bothered, seeing as even if he was somehow comatose, it would be far simpler for him to die and come back healed by that fun trick he had called immortality, or if he was just planning on sleeping for a 'bit' then why not just let his immortal healing deal with keeping his body ticking along.

The answer to these questions, as well as the reason he had decided to set this whole shebang up could be found at the head of the support bed. A brand new, state of the art, Nerve Gear helmet. If there was one thing Methos always tried to be, it was well prepared. He had no intention of ever having to seriously need the support bed, or be unaware of his surroundings long enough for his security to be needed. But just because he didn't expect it, does not mean he wasn't prepared to meet it, and meet it with the biggest and most unfair advantage he could manage. After all, one of his mottos was never fight fair if theres a chance you can loose, and even then cheating is good practise.

Ever since he had heard about the next-gen research into full immersion virtual reality, he had been fascinated. He had envisioned a multitude of possibilities from it, from a scenario like the matrix, where machines take over the world, to something like inception, where the internet connects not just databases, but the mind. And he loved that although just 20 years in the past those ideas and many more were just pipe dreams and science fiction, this technology would at least make it a possibility of them becoming reality.

So despite himself, he went back to school, AGAIN,(not that he, the eternal student, was complaining) and had learnt everything he could about electronics, computers, the brain and a smattering of other subjects.(an eidetic memory really helped, and when he wasn't set on just enjoying the student life, their were very few minds that could match him). He set up a new identity that would enable him to get his hands on the technology as soon as he could, and anxiously awaited its release.

All this culminated in today, August 6th 2022, the release of the beta test for Sword Art Online, the first serious piece of software for the nerve-gear. That in itself had been a surprise to him. He had been tinkering with the predecessors to the nerve-gear for a while, and he had tried every piece of software that was made for it, whether he should have it or not, as well as, he was proud to say, making some software himself. But none of those even held a candle to what Kayaba Akihiko, the genius behind full-dive technology, had come up with. When he thinks about it, a fantasy game really is the perfect setting to try and test the limits of this sort of system. So I've managed to get myself onto the beta test, I have a month off of work, the same length as the beta test, and all my obligations are taken care of for the time being. So, my plans are to not just play the beta, but live in it, for its entire length. Not because I'm some sort of hard core gamer, but because I want to discover this systems limits, both normally and in my own case. Thanks to the research I've done, coupled with my own 'unique' perspective, Ive discovered at least partly, just how impressive this technology is. It doesn't just let you experience a virtual reality, it directly interfaces with your brain, using a complex system of microwaves. What this amounts to is that someone who say, thinks a lot faster than the average person would be able to do a lot more, and technically even break the system in place and dictate heir own rules while connected, at least for a short while. In my own case, I happen to possess a mind that is over 5,000 years old (the actual age is for me to know and no-one else ever to find out, though how no-one has twigged on that I've been known as the 5,000 year old man for more than a millennium or two I'll never know). The upshot of this is that my mind is a lot more powerful and works at a much faster rate than the average. It would have to be if I didn't want my own personality to be swallowed up every time I took a quickening, especially the larger ones. So I was, needless to say, very curious, to find out to what lengths I could push the system.

The fact that I could remain anonymous, and that the main activity in this game was sword fighting was just a bonus. It had been millennia since I could let loose with all my skill without worrying about showing too much of my hand, whether it was in real life or a virtual one.

So after getting all the preparations in place, hooking myself up to the support system and calibrating the nerve-gear there was only one more thing to do.

"Link Start!"

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A/N - Well, thats the fastest update I've ever done but this story has grabbed a hold of me and I'm excited to see where I can take it. The next chapter starts us into SAO properly, not that most of the groundwork and backstory have bee laid. Any questions would be greatly appreciated and review would be great. Good-bye till next time and God Bless.


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